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Filling a Dance Card

If you’ve been monitoring the Twitter stream since Sunday evening, you’ll notice that there have been many happy posts from people whose presentation proposals have been accepted for the #ecoo13 conference, BringIT,Together. Indeed, part of the ECOO 13 Dance Card has been filled. Here’s how…

Potential presenters were asked to submit their sessions online. All of the information was collected in a database and there was an overwhelming total of entries exceeding 300. These needed to all be independently reviewed and such was the task assigned to each member of the committee of 14. In fact, each submission had at least three reviewers. That meant that each committee member had 60-65 proposals to review.

All of these reviews were collated and a smaller group of 6 got together in Milton on a Friday night/Saturday morning to revisit each of the proposals, consider the evaluations already submitted, make suggestions and ultimately arrive at the portion of the proposals that would receive an invitation. At this time, this included English language presentations. Still to be decided will be the French language presentations and the presentation given by exhibitors. The committee is excited by the selection of offerings to be delivered in French.

Sadly, not all of the proposals could be accepted. There’s just so many rooms and timeslots! The committee is working on a schedule designed to maximize the number of sessions offered.

For program purposes, each of the sessions were tagged by the committee and one of our members created a Wordle to give a sense of the content.

So, invitations have been extended and, as they’ve been confirmed, they’re added to the #ecoo13 Lanyrd site. You’re certainly welcome to visit the site and watch as it fills with confirmation from presenters. While there, if you’re going to join us in Niagara Falls on October 23-25, please indicate so.

If you can’t get enough of this, make sure that you install the Lanyrd app or follow the site on your smart phone. (It’s HTML5 enabled)

Now you’re hopefully excited!

After all, keynote speakers Amber MacArthur and Jaime Casap plus all of these great sessions offered by Ontario educators (and beyond!) promise that #ecoo13 will be a great conference.

The registration process is being tuned and will be available for use by registrants in June. Stay tuned to social media experts @pmcash and @aforgrave as they provide the latest details via their Twitter accounts, in the Facebook group and the Google Plus Community. Make friends online now and plan to meet them face to face at the conference. Got a colleague who needs a little prompting to get a Twitter account? Perhaps this is the opportunity to sit at their side and get them signed up!

If you’re reading this post and presenting, why not add a comment and let folks know your area of expertise.